Product roadmaps and me

Sep 30, 2018

I’ve now been working in government for over three years and product roadmaps have been a recurring theme. Not surprising, given that I’m a product manager? Well no - but the real reason they’ve been such a recurring theme is that I’ve found the humble product roadmap to be the ‘face’ for product management as a whole. Government contains lots of product managers who’re new to product management - and lots of product managers who’re new to government - and lots of people who’re new to the concept of product management. The product roadmap often becomes the site for exploring and explaining product management as a whole, for better or for worse.

So, in January 2017, I ran a session at the cross-government product meetup about what had worked and what hadn’t worked when attempting a portfolio-level roadmap in government. The later post referring to my session generated requests for help from other government departments who wanted to introduce or improve their use of product roadmaps, so much so that I wrote a follow-up post for the Government Digital Service, sharing simple tips for using product roadmaps. Once again, this generated multiple requests for help from other government departments (and a Local Authority) . . . so I started work on further support for roadmaps in the form of a diagram of a ‘good’ roadmap, with notes to explain the core concepts at play. I tweeted a picture of version 2 of this diagram that once again got a bunch of responses, including a suggestion to draft something for Mind the Product - which you can see here.

That’s probably as many posts as I can usefully write on the topic - but if you’re a government department, government delivery agency, or local authority and would like a chat about roadmaps then please feel free to get in touch on Twitter.